Tremendous resources are spent every year by individuals and companies to learn new languages. While an individual may be successful in learning a new language, it is quite often the case that the individual will have a strong accent. Typically, the accent is shaped by the native language of the individual. Having such an accent can be detrimental. As an example, strong accents can make understanding the spoken new language difficult. In addition, it is well known that having a strong accent can be a liability in the business world, especially in customer relations.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a universal way to denote the sounds (utterances) of human languages. Each human language has its own IPA, which is a subset of the full IPA. As is illustrated by the diagram of FIG. 1, there is an area of overlap between languages (denoted as A), and then there are sounds that exist in a certain language or languages but not in other languages (denoted as B).
Human language sounds fall into one of four broad categories, namely, consonants, vowels, tones and stress, intonation and rhythm. When an adult who is a native speaker of language X, studies language Y, sounds of language Y that are not part of the IPA for language X are difficult for the adult to produce. This difficulty is often heard as the foreign accent to native speakers of language Y. In addition, in some cases such an adult would find it challenging to even recognize and distinguish some of the sounds in the language Y IPA that are not part of the language X IPA.
Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.